The Metropolitan Museum’s New Pay Policy Diminishes New York City

The wonder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been that it is as open to the public as Central Park.

Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty

There are two ways to buy admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can
approach one of the lobby’s ticket counters, where an employee will take
any amount of money you wish to pay, or you can purchase a ticket for the
full suggested admission price—twenty-five dollars for an adult,
seventeen for seniors, twelve for students—at a vending machine or in
advance online. On a recent visit to the Met, I stood in a long line for
a ticket counter. The lobby hummed with holiday bustle. Tourists
wandered here and there, craning their necks. Locals plowed purposefully
ahead. Parents tugged kids swaddled in puffy coats across the floor. A
couple of teen-agers carrying sketchpads sat on a bench and rubbed
noses. But nobody was using the machines. They looked sort of forlorn,
waiting to be of help to some poor naïf who didn’t realize that he was
getting conned. “Suggested,” the woman behind me in line said, reading
the text displayed above the ticket counter. In the old days, the text
said “recommended admission,” and was printed in tiny type. Then the Met
changed the signage, after a class-action lawsuit accused the museum of
misleading visitors. Now everybody seems to be in the know.

On Thursday, the Met announced that as of March 1st, the
pay-what-you-wish policy, in place since 1970, will apply only to
residents of New York State. Everybody else will have to pay the full
fee. (They’ll be able to use their tickets for three consecutive days,
and at the Met Breuer and the Cloisters, too.) The Met says that the
change is an economic necessity. According to the Times, attendance
over the past decade has gone way up, from 4.7 million visitors a year
to seven million, but the proportion of visitors who pay the full
suggested price has fallen from sixty-three per cent to seventeen.
Admission fees provide forty-three million dollars a year, which amounts
to fourteen per cent of the museum’s annual operating budget; the Met
anticipates that that amount will now increase to forty-nine million
dollars.

This sounds reasonable enough, especially when you consider the Met’s
recent financial woes. Early last year, the Times reported that the
museum was running a nearly forty-million-dollar deficit. Construction
on a major new wing for modern and contemporary art, which was estimated
to cost six hundred million dollars and was intended to open in 2020,
the year of the museum’s hundred and fiftieth anniversary, was
indefinitely postponed. Then Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director,
resigned, amid rumors of mismanagement that included complaints from
museum employees about an “inappropriate relationship” with a staff
member. But by the end of the year things were looking up. The museum
projected that its deficit would be gone by 2020; the endowment
increased by nearly three hundred million dollars, in part thanks to an
eighty-million-dollar gift, the largest the museum had received in some
time, from Florence Irving, a trustee, and the estate of Herbert Irving,
her late husband.

Could the Met afford to keep admission at its suggested price for
everyone if it shifted its priorities? From an outsider’s vantage point,
it certainly seems possible. The Irving gift was intended to establish
various acquisition-endowment funds; what if, instead, it could have
been directed toward an endowment to subsidize admissions? In 2014,
construction was finished on the David H. Koch Plaza, the stretch of
Fifth Avenue in front of the museums’ main entrance, now updated to
include trees, café tables, and two sleek, black, charmless fountains
that look like something designed by Apple, all paid for
by—surprise!—David Koch. The cost was sixty-five million dollars, an
amount that makes the six-million-dollar anticipated increase from
ticket sales seem puny. It’s presumably easier to raise funds for a
specific, tangible project, one that will allow the donor’s name to be
grandly inscribed on walls and fountains, though, as Holland Cotter
noted in the Times, donor-subsidized admissions have been successful at other
institutions in the city. Museumgoers have to wonder how much effort the
Met has made to steer donors toward the less glamorous but equally,
perhaps more, urgent project of admissions. How could providing free
tables outside the museum seem a better use of money than insuring that
people can freely access the treasures within?

What can be said, definitively, is that the Met’s change of policy
diminishes the cultural life of New York. Yes, the MOMA, Whitney, and
Guggenheim charge similar, non-negotiable prices of admission, but those
museums are not comparable in size or scope to the Met. They also are
entirely private, whereas the Met’s building is owned by the City of New
York and thus supported by taxpayer dollars. And they don’t have the
Met’s special atmosphere—that spiritual, awesome charge produced by the
museum’s grandeur, the range of what is to be discovered inside it, and,
crucially, the mix of people who come to do the discovering. The wonder
of the Met is that it is as open to the public as Central Park. You can
walk in without a penny in your pocket and glide up the grand staircase
from the lobby to the European wing feeling like the richest person in
the world. That exquisite, luxurious feeling, of being able to pop in,
anytime, for a three-hour marathon at the Michelangelo exhibit, or to
spend half an hour with a book by the Temple of Dendur, or to pay your
respects to a favorite painting or sculpture for a minute or two, or
even, like my mother, to use the bathroom (“The one in the Egyptian
wing! I walk right past my favorite mummy,” she told me last night), is
an experience that can be found nowhere else in the city. It’s a feeling
of profound ownership and belonging. You feel it just walking by the
museum, even—maybe especially—when you have no intention of going in.

That openness is an ethical mission, and an especially important one in
a city that feels more and more closed. Last year, when the prospect of
enforced admissions for non-New Yorkers first came up, Mayor Bill de
Blasio was all for it, telling the Times, “I’m a big fan of Russian oligarchs paying more to get into the Met.” This is absurd. Billionaires
won’t suffer from admissions enforcement. The people affected by the
change will be families visiting our ruthlessly expensive city from out
of state or from another country; students who have taken the bus or
train in to fill their heads with art; immigrants without the right
papers. (The Met says that it will ask for documents of residency for
those claiming local privileges, though not insist on them. Apparently
the hope is that a firm “Better bring it with you next time” will
suffice.) The new policy will earn the museum more revenue. It will also
almost certainly restrict access. That, too, seems contrary to the ethos
of the Met as a place of refuge, a sanctuary in a city that also pledges
to be one.

There’s another lesson in all this. More of us should pay our fair
share. Ten years ago, more than half of visitors were paying the full
price, and now it’s less than a quarter. Why have so many of us decided
to be less generous? It can’t just be the clearer signage. I think it
has to do with a sense that the Met is a monolith run on donor money,
that our admissions dollars sink without consequence, like so many
pennies in one of David Koch’s fountains. Certainly, after all the news
last year about the Met’s egregious mismanagement of funds, I felt no
desire to give more. But habit is also to blame. It’s become second
nature to me to pay five dollars and go in, without stopping to
reconsider. Roberta Smith suggested that the Met come up with a campaign
to encourage visitors to pay more, a very good idea, especially if we
could know that by doing so we were helping out fellow-museumgoers who
might otherwise be shut out. If only the Met had thought to appeal to
its visitors before it came to such an unfortunate conclusion.